P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3

[Warlord Zsinj]

No, I mean the broad brush strokes of the texture design. What parts are what colour, how contrasted elements are, which bits are brought forward, which recede, etc. The bits your eye picks up first that defines the thing, before your eye begins to notice details. I think argh's done a reasonable job there.

[Guessmyname]

I still wish he'd kept the original hands.

It would have been so cool to watch it stride into battle by kicking and hammer punching (put both hands together and raise and lower arms like swinging a hammer to pound the ground) and simply picking stuff up and either crushing it in it's hands or simply tossing it out into the horizon...

[KDR_11k]

No, I mean the broad brush strokes of the texture design. What parts are what colour, how contrasted elements are, which bits are brought forward, which recede, etc. The bits your eye picks up first that defines the thing, before your eye begins to notice details. I think argh's done a reasonable job there.

AFAIK that's called the low frequency detail.

[Warlord Zsinj]

ah, well, I hadn't run into the term before, so I wasn't aware. I thought you were referring specifically to what is visible from afar.

[Argh]

It's called "applied color theory".

"Low frequency detail" refers to contrast management. If you want to read more about that concept... go here.

As for the idea that I use a texture that I just dump and cut... I only wish it was that easy.

A piece like this has so many parts, at so many different levels of detail, that's impossible, of course. Some parts were beveled by hand, others required a lot of work with the Lasso tool, due to distortion, etc. And, of course, for it to have that "Overmind" look, the edges need a lot of very specific details- the square patterns, the cut-off corners, etc., etc., that make the look consistent. And since part of the "look" is how those outer edges are connected to the interior... well, that can't be dumped, either.

So... I cut it all out. By hand. Which, for this guy, took about 2 hours, because we're talking several hundred cuts. I think I did all right, speed-wise, all things considered- the total time was around 8 hours, from raw mesh to final paint, including a map for lights and reflectivity. Other than the LandFactory and the AdvanceBase, this was one of the lengthiest paint-ups in the game.

Comments like:

Why does it have ARM logo greebles for nipples ?

Show you folks out there learning how to skin how quickly people pick up any details that are unusual, and break a pattern- it's the only major place with an oblique cutout, and it was something that this player noticed right away. Consistent treatment of stuff is very important.

Oh, and lastly... I explained, previously, why I couldn't use the hands. It's just how it goes, there are too many technical issues. I think that when people get to see what I've done instead, they'll be happy, though.

[Warlord Zsinj]

The means by which you achieved the panel noise was an aside to my main criticism of the texture.

[Argh]

Meh, tbh, I don't feel like talking about any of the rest of your "critique", because I quit reading it when I reached that point. Sorry... lemme finish reading it...

Oh, you said something about greebling the metal. Yeah, I suppose I could do that, won't take very long. I don't care about the rest of it, it's too vague and this isn't art school, I have a deadline.

[Pressure Line]

Comments like:

Why does it have ARM logo greebles for nipples ?

Show you folks out there learning how to skin how quickly people pick up any details that are unusual, and break a pattern- it's the only major place with an oblique cutout, and it was something that this player noticed right away. Consistent treatment of stuff is very important.

Indeed, I noticed it within ~5 seconds of seeing the image. And it really does look like the arm logo

[Warlord Zsinj]

eh, I was just trying to be constructive.

[smoth]

since you removed my comment from moddb >:|

I tried your latest version. Still I get ~45 fps when normally I have around 150. The birds were funny, they kept piling in corners or swimming around in the water. They also go to icons most of the time so they are flying squares 90% of the time.

[Argh]

Still I get ~45 fps when normally I have around 150.

Where? In the city test, or just on any ol' map? When action's happening, or from the start?

If it's at the start, I dunno what to tell you, except that nobody else reported results like that.

Generally speaking, I don't see any worse performance with this than with CA, and generally speaking, with the same unit-counts, it's usually better, on anything but the test maps with fog and lots of other crap going on.

You've gotta realize, though, that those are pushing the outer limits of what's currently possible, though. It's like jK's Water4, which I can hardly run on this machine, but can run just great at my folk's place, where they have that 9800GTX. There are a lot of walls to performance in Spring's rendering system- the map format's a lot slower than anything I've seen in a commercial game, and I only have very crude tools for handling scene complexity compared to anything that's modern.

The city test map, in particular, is pretty much a crusher. It's a hell of a lot of polygons, especially when you have reflections on. The next ones won't be so bad.

The high-impact stuff, like the CEGs, is pretty much unavoidable atm. Other than those... it's just about how much stuff is getting shoved through the renderer, tbh. Until I get a better drawing method for handling scenery stuff, it's a constant tradeoff, even with the LOD system.

I hit the wall on the GPU well before the CPU most of the time on this machine, until late game.

The birds were funny, they kept piling in corners or swimming around in the water. They also go to icons most of the time so they are flying squares 90% of the time.

Yeah, they were pretty much just a prototype, and there were various goofy behaviors with them. It won't be quite as bad in the next version, but they're still Units, so they're going to be subject to icon distance, and if you don't have that set == the unit draw distance, you'll see those stupid gray blocks.

Nothing I can do about that, except force people's settings to the correct points, which is possible but would lead to whining from people with low-end computers.

[smoth]

argh gundam has cegs also.. just in case you forgot . gundam has oodles of cegs, shit the doms practically breathe ceg effects.

I don't think it is the cegs, I played one game on what looked like a foothills remake and then tried aftershock and the comet catcher map. All 3 had about 45 or lower with nothing happening. At the beginning of a gundam game I see 150. There was another map cold something or other which ran the same around 45. do you have vsync off?

something else is awry here man.

[Argh]

Yeah, I have vsync off... that lets me see where choke's happening to some extent. Take a screenshot of your graphs, I'd like to see the CPU use.

I just checked my current numbers, btw... 88FPS, with the following settings:

1600/1200 resolution
32 viewdistance
shadows ON, 4096
reflections ON

voidwater map, 8X8, stock zoom.

Credits OFF, Help O' Matic ON, Brief O' Matic OFF, and the default team-platters.

CPU wasn't even an issue, on my Athlon XP 2800 and Geforce 7800GT. It was ticking over very easily.

Zoom way out, on a big city map, or turn on Water 2 or 4... and, on this hardware, it's a different story

Lastly... what Widgets do you have on? I don't have a blacklist application in RC3, so that might explain some of the issues, if you didn't install it "stock" from the Windows binary.

[smoth]

this is on a 280 blah blah my new mega machine, again, I can run gundam and at this point in the game would have >120 fps

here are your graphs. I have to go to bed soon and will be too busy to be on here so hopefully this gives you some idea.

[Argh]

Yeah, it's pretty obvious. Water's eating 50% of your CPU. Was this the Windows installer?

[smoth]

why would it be? I run dynamic most of the time. it costs me at most 10-15 fps to have it on. Is is possible that you have something that reacts badly with it?

[Argh]

Anything's possible. I practically never run Water 2, my GPU won't handle it, and I just assumed that most people's still couldn't either.

That doesn't explain the results on Comet Catcher, though, I think that's voidwater. Try running that... and set Water0, see what happens. I'm a little curious- I just did a test, and the caustics I'm using are a LOT faster than jK's stock ones, on my hardware, for Water4. However, that's new, and not in RC3.

[smoth]

will run water zero for you on cc but after that I have to bail.

[smoth]

hmm you have vsync on. that always gives me much lower fps... let me try with out it.

yeah I get about 120 fps.

[Argh]

Hmm. DrawWorld is eating 46% there. Nothing's happening, other than the UI, which is hardly a giant CPU-eater over here.

Do you have Compress Textures on, or off? IIRC, there's another issue, that's already fixed in SVN, relating to texture stuff.